Bravery dents Brown armour

If Gordon Brown's task last week was to deliver an election-winning speech, David Cameron's yesterday was to do the opposite of what the Tory leader demanded in his much-cheered peroration: to make a speech good enough to prevent an early test of strength against a heavily-armoured enemy. Did he succeed as the party faithful cheered him out of the Empress Ballroom and the rightwing unfaithful buttoned their collective lip? Only Mr Brown's lonely reading of the weekend's post-Blackpool polls and other runes will tell.

But it was a brave and elegant effort, the climax of a week in which the Tory leadership has punched above its weight. It goes home with a spring in its step after all - a brief respite, but a respite.

Mr Cameron must believe that time and events are on the Conservatives' side in 2008-09. Unwisely perhaps, Mr Brown has been behaving as if he thinks that too. To that extent the Cameron tactic yesterday was that of a guerrilla commander, forced to fall back on asymmetrical warfare.

Faced with the clunking great fist ("Strength to Change Britain" was Labour's slogan in Bournemouth) he adopted the lighter tone that comes naturally to him.

Even the speech, part rehearsed, part busked, was a form of improvised device, deliberately chosen to penetrate Brownite armour.

The speech "may be a bit messy", he warned them at the start, "but it'll be me". The same conversational tactic delivered him the leadership here in 2005. Yesterday they listened thoughtfully, though few will have been moved to weep for joy. In the Facebook sense that Mr Cameron's generation invokes (he had a good Facebook joke) it was a cool event, rarely an emotionally hot one.

The use of the widescreen "New World, Old Politics" video was probably a UK political first, a slick one that Labour may rapidly purloin.

Content-wise, this was a precis of the week's announcements, some good, some bad, some as ridiculous as Mr Brown's own claim that he could guarantee "British jobs for British workers" or deportation for EU crooks. Tory plans to duff up Europe are as vainglorious.

But just as Mr Brown focused much of his attention on shoring up his credentials as a C1 British nationalist - Mr Cameron mocked him as cynical for that - so the Tory leader touched base with Middle Britain's sensitive bits too. Like George Osborne, William Hague, David Davis and others, he did so on Europe, on crime, the armed forces, on reform of the benefits system, on self-interested matters like tax.

Emboldened by the Brown precedent, he deftly addressed the immigration issue too, wrapping bits of red meat in with the more liberal vegetables. Craftily, he congratulated his activists ("I didn't do it, you did it") on reforms he had imposed.

The bookies last night enticed the gullible with good odds on Cameron being out by Christmas. Ignore them.